Close-packed pages of household news, of minutiae on fashions, furnishings, genealogy, of detailed political and diplomatic reports, and, intermittently, of praise for Dolley whose purity of soul would seem to have equalled the graciousness of her person. Not that one sees much of her: when she 'hesitates' over John Todd's proposal, the Constitutional Convention undertakes and completes its business, and the site of the nation's capital is determined and surveyed, before her decision is made known.

Her widowed years in strained circumstances, inherently interesting, are encrusted with assessments (often acid) of the hostessing inclinations and capabilities of her several successors, and the admiration she merits for coping unpretentiously is hard to extend to one so fulsomely admired from the start. The author is less wisely discreet than her Dolley (John Adams' name hardly appears without a term of opprobrium), and she is to say the least tactless in her blessings on faithful black servants--most particularly "the children's colored mammy" who, given her freedom by Dolley's Quaker father, "insisted on accompanying her darlings" and cared nothing for her new wages.

In any case tedious for anyone who would know the legendary Dolley, and useless for perceiving the "strong-minded woman, fully capable of entering into her husband's occupations and cares" which Harriet Martineau believed her to be. Kirkus Reviews